New York Letter With Alagi Yorro Jallow: There Is No Winning In Afghanistan

(JollofNews)- The United States must consider Afghanistan the center of a generation-long fight against extremism with no definition of ‘victory.’ That’s what “experts” Michael O’Hanlon and David Petraeus argue in a recent article in the USA Today network.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. one must take the profit out of war. A $54 billion increase in the Pentagon budget will not help America win wars. It will help America get deeper into wars which will bring increased threats to her national security.

There is no winning in Afghanistan. The country has never been conquered since the time of Alexander the Great. I truly feel sorry for the American Armed Forces that will have to endure more lost comrades until a clear exit strategy is created. And until they do they US government had better make more room in Arlington.

Robert McNamara, the brilliant Secretary of defense for Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, helped lead America into Vietnam. McNamara believed that the fight against communism in Asia was worth sacrificing American lives, and yet he eventually came to believe that America had stumbled into a war – in which it had lost over 58,000 men and women – that was, in fact, unnecessary and unwinnable. The lessons of Vietnam were forgotten.

“We have to start winning wars again,” President Donald Trump told the nation’s governors yesterday. No, President Trump, America must stop military interventionism. The wars you win are the ones you don’t start. President Trump you said, “America spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas when we should have been spending it here at home, to create jobs and rebuild infrastructure, for example”.

America haven’t won any war since World War II. President Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t fight to win in Vietnam. Eisenhower didn’t fight to win in Korea, George H. Bush Sr. didn’t fight to win in Kuwait, George W. Bush Jr. and Barack Obama didn’t fight to win in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Americans are tired of seeing their brave men and women go into battle with their hands tied behind their backs by the lily-livered politicians who can’t stand the sight of blood. Don’t send them at all. Don’t be a bull in a china shop.

According to reports, the long-term cost of US interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere may reach $6 trillion when everything is totaled. US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan approach 7,000, with tens of thousands permanently injured. Civilian casualties in Iraq alone exceed one million, in Afghanistan over 2000 Americans have died fighting a totally unjustified war.

Iraq, a secular, socialist state, was not involved in 9/11, had no links with the Al-Qaeda. Baghdad presented no clear and present danger to its neighbors, and none to the US or Britain. The truth is that what was at stake was not an imminent military or terrorist threat but the economic imperatives of US growth. Iraq has 112 billion barrels of proven resources, or roughly 11 percent of the world’s proven supply. That is more oil than the resources of Europe and South America put together, and more than Africa and the Asia-Pacific region combined. That oil has global strategic, political and economic significance. The temptation to grab it must have been irresistible.

North Korea has admitted it has nuclear capability but it is not invaded as Iraq was. If Saddam didn’t have oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders in the Islamic world do it every day with the blessings of the United States.

Opposition to the war in the US is growing, although the primary cause for this opposition is that the cost of the war is too great and unacceptable to the American people. It is deplorable, but nonetheless, true, that what has changed public opinion in the US and its domestic political picture, is not the efforts of its intellectuals but rather the Afghans resistance which simply will not yield to American force.

President John Quincy Adam’s caution to America not to go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy or securing American interests has been thrown to the winds. Neither George Washington, nor James Madison nor Thomas Jefferson saw America as the world’s avenging angel. The lesson of history is that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Now President Trump wants to continue war in Afghanistan their tribal areas. However, it is war, a war it cannot win.

Today nationalism is among the most potent phenomenon of political life in this part of the world. In the past, nationalism had succeeded in disrupting the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

If the United States persists in waging this totally unnecessary and unjustified war, it would suffer a similar fate. If America wants to make headway against Muslim rage, it will have to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people. It will have to vacate its aggression in Afghanistan and withdraw its support of tyrannies in the Muslim world

That country will never be conquered. Ask all those super powers that tried. There is no solution but one. Cut you losses, and retreat. You can choose to put a lead on it by selective engagement, so it is not overrun by terrorists and become a nuclear threat, but deployment of troops is a strategy without end and a guaranteed failure. An unnecessary loss of life. This will be a Trump truth soon enough. The US needs to get out of that hell now. The coup de grass will be to bait China into a conflict there, so US can exit. But Trump is not as smart as I am. Forget it. It won’t happen.

If any world power could have won a war in Afghanistan, it would have been it’s next door neighbour, the then Soviet Union, Russia.
The mention of Trump’s name and drawing a debate on his capabilities and his intelligence is demeaning to the overall sanity of these forums. He is a curse to the United States and its greatness, a fact every sensible man will learn sooner or later. Bloody KKK who will love to try a hit on ball on top of a black child’s head with a baseball bat. The bloody migrant who is very much bitter of America’s multiculturalism especially the indigenous Indian and African American.
Trump, the specific breed of arrogant ignorant migrant who thinks of nothing but the bloody meat on his plate. America this time around, have proven to be a politically dumb world power indeed by buying a ticket for Trump and his team to the white house. It is really hard to believe to see a great country like America reducing itself to nothingness by employing a gang of mediocre so-called politicians to lead them to a so-called Make America Great Again. Bet he’ll be on the line to Thomas Rob, Robber…whatever, if his puppies will show him this piece of hate of him. Per—- of a p—y gr—er, women’s sneaker disrespect, come president of the great United States of America. He is possibly the proof that, claims of existence of an Illuminati, is not just a sign of frustration and paranoia of the present generation. Your jaw drops hearing a supporter of him saying; “Trump is anti…….., anti…….., and, and also ANTI-STUPID?? Trump is anti-stupid?? To such comments, a Caribbean blogger would say; “hey, the struggle is real”. The world I believe have never been a the safest planet but evidently its very existence is being endangered by perilous beings, to the detriment of all efforts to make it a better world. Good over all evil.

We got to look beyond the deceiving main stream media headlines, if we want to understand what’s happening in the USA and the consequences of this unprecedented, but strategic state directed criminality to those countries in its sight.
The US don’t want to win the war in Afghanistan. The strategic aim is to foment manageable chaos, dubbed “Low intensity conflict”, that will justify, not only the continued pouring of resources into the arms industry, but the permanent stationing of US troops around the globe to further its economic and political goals.
A defected Taliban commander made similar remarks on.an Aljazeera documentary on the war in Afghanistan. He said he can obliterate the Taliban with half the resources the US deploys in that country, but he knows that the US has no such wish.
Former Afghanistan President, Ahmed Karzai, said that they know that the US is constantly in contact with the Taliban, through their allies in Pakistan and certain Gulf States.
The citizens of the US must rescue their country these maniacs that have hijacked their great nation, otherwise, the end will.be painful.
They are diluted to think that they can continue to wreck havoc on the world, without consequences.
Today, after creating such havoc in Iraq and Syria, their experts are now laying the grounds for the realisation of a decades old Washington Policy, to carve out a new, US friendly and dependent Kurdish state, that would become a buffer between Iran and Syria, thus weakening those two states, for eventual destruction.
Whether this will happen or not, and the consequences will determine the type of world.we live in, as Russia, China, Iran and Turkey are also determined to protect their own interests in the region.

The u-turn (if it’s that at all) of President Trump on Afghanistan is not surprising to many who follow US politics closely. The candidates promise less wars and interventions when seeking election, but perpetrate more wars and interventions, when elected.
Mr Jallow is right: “War is Wealth”, and for the criminal cabal in Washington, who remorselessly murder millions, including babies and children, and cruelly label them as “collateral damage”, only few things matter: WEALTH, POWER and INFLUENCE. And in the pursuit of the achievement of these, nothing is beyond limit, in their eyes, even actively engineering situations to expedite the process.

Very interesting contributions from Bourne and Bax and Alagi; But I have heard all this before; So should the police and the American GI, stop shooting terrorists and kiss the child suicide bomber on the cheek ? The strange thing about the terrorists is that they have killed more muslims than any other ethnic race. Those states who support and encourage terrorism, and also possess Nuclear arms and technology, now pose a threat that will endanger the whole world if not checked and constantly monitored. Their may as suggested be no solution or final end game in sight. But to concede defeat and do nothing is not an option. To cage America and its President, would not make this world any safer. It appears to me from the outset that the media are constantly looking to engineer any opportunity to trip Trump into a state of incompetence. Trump on the other hand, is not looking like a winner in the Whitehouse. Which poses the question, is the threat to Trump by Trump himself greater that the deepening threat from Global terrorism ?

Mike, how do you label the guy who ploughed into the crowd of counter protesters at Charlottesville with a car?
And how do you distinguish the American teen who went on a shooting spree killing black people, from the child suicide bomber? Oh, the Deutsch passenger pilot who took to altitude in order to plummet the craft nose crashing down in the pyrenees mountains… No, that one is not a case to count on. He was proved mentally insane! I don’t really understand how the term ‘terrorist’ is applied or how the term ‘hate crime’, is applied.
I am constantly mesmerized by the fact that hate killings, racial killings and killings across the globe that may be inspired by misguided religious indoctrination, are all not the same ‘terror’. I have sought for help to understand the difference many a times to no avail.

I was thinking the other day about how this killing of children and the innocent on our streets and at public gatherings has become “Normal” compared to 20 or 30 years ago. I wondered if these young men who do these acts, would have reacted the day before if they saw a child who was injured or an old lady fallen clutching her chest. I have a mind to think they would have gone to their assistance as an act of humanity.
They seem to have a mindset to commit the act at the expense of their life. A state of mind that temporarily leaves human reason and rationality to one side. We must also be mindful that the Afghan has been the most determined and committed warrior for centuries, defeating the Romans, Alexander The Great and Genghis Khan, the British and the Russians and to some degree the American’s and its allies.

Bourne; You ask some pertinent questions about senseless criminal acts, for which the law applies consequences. As an elder thinker, I was totally in support of
Dr Martin Luther King. his wisdom and his humble humility. I thought this situation had been addressed by government, but it simmers always just below the surface. President Trumps hesitance to condemn the far rights extremists was ill considered and and not representative of mainstream public and governmental thinking. One consequence of social media is that we can whip up a storm to form a public presence on the city streets. We are then invited to take a side in the argument. I think on the whole, the public get it right most of the time.